The Clearly Product Book Club Podcast - Clearly Product

When choosing which book to read next for Episode 2 of the Clearly Product Book Club Podcast, Anna Marie and myself decided that something related to communications would be ideal. It’s basically the core of what the PM role entails. All of the overly focused ‘how to communicate with your team’ books seemed fine, but nothing really stood out as being overly interesting or powerful. Until we came across ‘Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It’ by Chris Voss. A Former FBI Hostage Negotiator, Voss’ approach to negotiating is very different from that taught in any academic setting — and, as we found out, much more powerful.

Harvard MBAs ain’t got shi*t on Voss

The book starts by establishing Voss as an expert in negotiations by showing how he was able to basically ‘beat’ everyone at HBS — his fellow students and professors alike. Why? The core of negotiations, as it’s taught today, focus on deciding what is equal and fair, analyzing how to put together a reasonable package for each side, and then deciding together upon the outcome. Many of the ideas taught in hallmark negotiations book ‘Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In’ by Roger Fisher are the tactics used by many business people today. Voss’ main argument is that this overall model doesn’t actually work, and unless you understand emotionally what the other person is feeling, and spend the time to empathize with their position, you’re unlikely to end up with the optimal outcome.

Tips and Tricks and Anecdotes, oh my!

Never Split the Difference is full of amazing advice, in various forms. Voss’ high-stakes experiences as an FBI negotiator leads to many edge-of-your-seat mini-case studies, where he exposes the techniques and strategies he learned while in the field, and how to then apply those to your personal and professional life. 

The book also contains an amazing collection of the science on how people think and make decisions, detailed ‘how-to’ strategies for different types of interactions, tips-and-tricks that you can start using in one of your negotiations today, all anchored to his core belief of the importance of getting to and dealing with the ‘lizard brain’ of your negotiation partner.

But don’t I only negotiate my raise? Resources for next month? Some-other-infrequent-thing?

Negotiations are everywhere, they’re one of the core ways that people interact with each other. A negotiation is simply: 

A discussion aimed at reaching an agreement

I bet you’ve already negotiated several things this week. And, unfortunately, you’ve probably landed on an outcome that wasn’t as advantageous as it could have been. 

We really enjoyed this book, and hope you’ll listen along to the second episode of the podcast as we discuss how we’ve already applied the theories in roles, how negotiating fits into the skill set of great product people, and how we plan on working on becoming even better negotiators at work and at home.

 

Listen below to the Never Split the Difference episode of the Clearly Product Book Club Podcast, and don’t forget to subscribe!

Episode 2: Never Split the Difference

Clearly Product

For the first episode of the Cleary Product Book Club Podcast, we chose an Alan Cooper (of Cooper Design) standard, published back in 1999. The book dives into why software needs to start with design, and explains some of the core problems associated with building software that make it easy to build overly complicated, non-user-friendly products. While many of the ideas presented in the book have become norms across the tech industry over the past 17 years since it was first published, the core concepts are extremely important. If anything, their commonness causes the ideas to be forgotten — and the book offers a first-principles refresher on exactly why design has maintained it’s stronghold on the early stages of building software today.

Some of the core ideas that we talk about include:

• All users are not the same! Some are beginners, some are intermediate, and some are advanced in terms of their understanding of and how they use your product. To design for only one class of user is setting any of the other two groups up for failure, or at least a non-optimal experience.
• Working in tech, we’re often blinded to the fact that not everyone experiences technology in the same way. The core understandings of how products work are often very different. It’s quite rare to build for a user that understands technology in the same way that you do. For most users? Technology is much more difficult and confusing for them than for the people who are building it. What may seem like an easy obvious fix for people working in Product may in fact be too much cognitive friction for users.

“He makes a major point that around how hard computers are and how hard they don’t have to be.… We’re living in this world where we’re blinded to it because it’s so much better to have a computer involved in so many things that we’re willing to overlook its downfalls.” — Anna Marie Clifton

• Designing product requires a ton of communication across the team. Product people need to recognize that all of those people are very different, and while it’s often known that they each use different modes and styles of communication, the actual words that a team use are the same… but the undersanding of what those words mean can be drastically different. If you don’t ‘come to terms’ with the people you’re working with, it’s impossible to have clarity around what you’re actually building and how you’ll get there.

“…when you start working on a project, a certain feature or an entire product together with a team, it’s extremely important to start from first principles in terms of what are the actual words that you’re using, what do they mean and what do people think that they mean.” — Sandi MacPherson

• Adding features is not the way to solve problems. Full stop. Cooper compares how we solve user problems to that of a Swiss Army Knife — with a physical object, you can’t just keep adding tools. Unfortunately software makes it overly easy to add and add and add features, ultimately leading to feature bloat.

Be sure to subscribe on iTunes, or listen here: 

Ep 1: The Inmates Are Running the Asylum

Clearly Product

Anna Marie and I geek out on product all the time. These conversations tend to be particularly eye-opening for us because of the fact that we work on very different types of products, at very different types of companies. Anna Marie is a Product Manager at Yammer, an enterprise collaboration tool owned by Microsoft. Meanwhile, I work on a consumer news product at my one-person company, Quibb. We’ve learned a ton from each other, and wanted to put a bit of pressure on ourselves to have even better, more focused conversations.

First step? We choose product-related books to read concurrently. Once we’re both finished, we’ll sit down — just the two of us — and have a discussion about the book. We’ll chat about what we learned, what we liked, where we disagreed, and professional experiences that we’ve had that are related to the book’s content.

…And we’ll record it!

The Clearly Product Book Club Podcast

Today we’re happy to announce that these discussions will be the core of our new podcast. We’ll be choosing books that cover some area that is required to be a strong product person. Beyond applying our own personal experiences as they relate to the topics, we’ll sometimes pull in experts and authors too.

Our lucky position

Both Anna Marie and myself are in a very privileged position. Living in the Bay Area, we have access to some of the sharpest, experimental, and experienced product people globally. We’re also both extremely active in holding conversations and meetings with our peers, making sure we’re on top of what matters and what’s new in the realm of product. The openness of founders, product people, and investors in the Bay Area is unmatched, and we’re excited to blend our knowledge and learnings from those interactions with the Clearly Product audience.

Reading is (actually) hard

It’s tough to keep up, we know. We hope that in addition to helping you to narrow in on books that actually matter, we’ll be able to offer a more in-depth, value-add approach to the existing time you spend reading. We’re both (independently) huge fans of Mortimer J. Adler’s How to Read a Book. His perspective on how to best leverage the information and time spent reading is one that influences how we approach reading:

“The art of reading, in short, includes all of the same skills that are involved in the art of unaided discovery: keenness of observation, readily available memory, range of imagination, and, of course, an intellect trained in analysis and reflection.”

It’s only through active discussion and connecting experiences and previous readings that you can truly absorb and generate the most value from the sheets clustered inside any book. 

Helping you become a well-rounded, informed product person

We’ll be choosing books that we believe are relevant and important to add to your arsenal. Through active, informal discussion with two people at the two extremes of the product world in the Bay Area, we’ll expose different ways to think about the content, and share our own real-life trials and tribulations as we work to strengthen our product taste, strategy, and understanding.

We hope you’ll join us :)

 

Episode 0 - An introduction

Clearly Product